Meredith Carson... Across the Pond and Back Again...

I am not a coward when it comes to color.  Our last kitchen was a brilliant shade of orange, which we loved, and we have recently painted our "new" kitchen the perfect shade of red.  Color is our friend... We are not afraid of color for the record.  My husband and I have been inspired by the new hue in our kitchen, and we are eager to cover the rest of our walls in more exciting non-neutral shades.  Our eldest daughter is also anxious to change things up in her bedroom.  Sounds lovely, doesn't it? There is one small problem.  I don't want to paint my daughter's bedroom "the color of a yellow highlighting marker" (her description).  I thought we had settled on a lovely shade of purple, after much hemming and hawing, when out of the blue, she brought up turquoise blue.  Nothing in the child's room matches turquoise blue...although it is a lovely color.  So we discussed this.  Then she suggested a color from our paint sample wheel which...

My baby turned eight this weekend...EIGHT!!  We had a really nice time celebrating on Saturday with our adopted family, the Collinses.  Liam Collins turned eleven on Sunday, so we just made a joint birthday celebration and had a fantastic time.  Emma says it was her best birthday ever even though we didn't have a big party with loads of kids and fuss... in fact, perhaps that is why it was the best birthday ever.  We were able to focus on celebrating the kids whom we love without worrying about all of the other birthday party dramas and details. I love the person that Emma is becoming.  She has always been such a sweet and sensitive character, but growing up also means that there are some painful lessons to learn and some "mean girls" to be dealt with.  On several different occasions recently, Emma has been on the verge of tears after school.  Girls there have been doing some of the same mean and nasty things that they did when I was eight....

Life will never be perfect again. I was fooling myself all along when I thought I could make things just right, but that is my nature. I tend to make lists and plan out how everything should go on special occasions... much like Will Ferrell's character in Elf: "First we'll make snow angels for two hours, then we'll go ice skating. Then we'll eat a whole roll of Tollhouse cookie dough as fast as we can, and then...we'll snuggle!" But this year with three children, I have officially had to let go of my inner perfectionist. I let go of the lists of things that are supposed to happen at Christmastime and just went with the flow. This year's gingerbread house (pictured above) was entirely kid-created, apart from a little help with the assembly from our resident engineer. Honestly, I think it's the happiest-looking gingerbread house we've ever had. Also, there just wasn't time to make the traditional Christmas cookies this year with every...